WotC Mike Mearls: "D&D Is Uncool Again"

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In Mike Mearls' recent interview with Ben Riggs, he talks about how he feels that Dungeons & Dragons has had its moment, and is now uncool again. Mearls was one of the lead designers of D&D 5E and became the franchise's Creative Director in 2018. He worked at WotC until he was laid off in 2023. He is now EP of roleplaying games at Chaosium, the publisher of Call of Chulhu.

My theory is that when you look back at the OGL, the real impact of it is that it made D&D uncool again. D&D was cool, right? You had Joe Manganiello and people like that openly talking about playing D&D. D&D was something that was interesting, creative, fun, and different. And I think what the OGL did was take that concept—that Wizards and this idea of creativity that is inherent in the D&D brand because it's a roleplaying game, and I think those two things were sundered. And I don’t know if you can ever put them back together.

I think, essentially, it’s like that phrase: The Mandate of Heaven. I think fundamentally what happened was that Wizards has lost the Mandate of Heaven—and I don’t see them even trying to get it back.

What I find fascinating is that it was Charlie Hall who wrote that article. This is the same Charlie Hall who wrote glowing reviews of the 5.5 rulebooks. And then, at the same time, he’s now writing, "This is your chance because D&D seems to be stumbling." How do you square that? How do I go out and say, "Here are the two new Star Wars movies. They’re the best, the most amazing, the greatest Star Wars movies ever made. By the way, Star Wars has never been weaker. Now is the time for other sci-fi properties", like, to me that doesn’t make any sense! To me, it’s a context thing again.

Maybe this is the best Player’s Handbook ever written—but the vibes, the audience, the people playing these games—they don’t seem excited about it. We’re not seeing a groundswell of support and excitement. Where are the third-party products? That’s what I'd ask. Because that's what you’d think, "oh, there’s a gap", I mean remember before the OGL even came up, back when 3.0 launched, White Wolf had a monster book. There were multiple adventures at Gen Con. The license wasn’t even official yet, and there were already adventures showing up in stores. We're not seeing that, what’s ostensibly the new standard going forward? If anything, we’re seeing the opposite—creators are running in the opposite direction. I mean, that’s where I’m going.

And hey—to plug my Patreon—patreon.com/mikemearls (one word). This time last year, when I was looking at my post-Wizards options, I thought, "Well, maybe I could start doing 5E-compatible stuff." And now what I’m finding is…I just don’t want to. Like—it just seems boring. It’s like trying to start a hair metal band in 1992. Like—No, no, no. Everyone’s mopey and we're wearing flannel. It's Seattle and rain. It’s Nirvana now, man. It’s not like Poison. And that’s the vibe I get right now, yeah, Poison was still releasing albums in the ’90s. They were still selling hundreds of thousands or a million copies. But they didn’t have any of the energy. It's moved on. But what’s interesting to me is that roleplaying game culture is still there. And that’s what I find fascinating about gaming in general—especially TTRPGs. I don’t think we’ve ever had a period where TTRPGs were flourishing, and had a lot of energy and excitement around them, and D&D wasn’t on the upswing. Because I do think that’s what’s happening now. We’re in very strange waters where I think D&D is now uncool.
 

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I definitely get that WotC has said it's the best-selling book now; another poster made that abundantly clear to me.

I hope Beyond is able to keep up with whatever metrics are required to not get it shuttered too.

Main reason I haven't subscribed. Tgey keep crowing about 13 million accounts but only 2 million are active apparently.

Can't take away my books.
 

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I doubt I am, as I said, any DM can TPK the party, Mike knows that. So the advice is not ‘the DM should try to wipe out the characters’, because the DM actually trying that means the DM will succeed at it. Context people…

IMHO you don't want to wipe out the party. Or even routinely kill them.

You want the illusion of it though and raise dead exists for a reason.
 


Of course the DM is the foil to the player’s success, I explained that already. There is no other obstacle to the players just strolling to success other than the DM and whatever they put in front of the characters. The BBEG is not there to help the characters out
Giving the PCs obstacles they have to surmount is not defeating or foiling them. It's challenging them. Those are incredibly different things.

If you put an obstacle--a monster, a trap, a riddle--in front of the PCs and they kill, disarm, or solve it, you didn't defeat or foil them because they managed to pass it.
 

I'm fairly certain that is not even close to paraphrasing what he said.

This seems more akin to a crusade than a discussion.

From one of his tweets:

Whether it's a dead character or failure in whatever context the session presents, the bigger the threat, the more meaning play has to us emotionally and spiritually. Removing it from the game turns it into time-wasting slop.

Clearly he was calling someone’s game time-wasting slop.
 




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